Generally, in the field of telecommunications, communication transmissions are facilitated by the use of communication platforms (e.g. relay stations). These communication platforms include any vehicle, manned or unmanned, that passes over, or hovers over a territorial coverage region, ranging from typical altitudes of manned and unmanned aircraft (UAVs) and lighter than air (LTA) platforms, to communication satellites in any orbit, not just of the Earth but of any celestial object such as the Moon or Mars. Typically, communication platforms function on the bent-pipe principle, where the communication platform receives signals from the ground via receive antenna beams and return signals back to Earth via transmit antenna beams with only amplification and a shift from the uplink or downlink frequency. However, as the world begins to increasingly demand greater bandwidth and greater throughput due to the advancement of internet traffic, e-commerce, computers and other digital technologies, the existing architectures are increasingly more impractical or expensive. For example, existing examples of high throughput multi-beam communication platforms operating exclusively in frequency division multiple access (FDMA) are commonplace, but the demands made on the architectures are increasingly stretching the cost and practicality of the architecture. In the case of high throughput multi-beam communication platforms operating exclusively in FDMA, the architecture requires a large number of antenna beams to provide the frequency reuse required to maximize total throughput. The architecture also has large numbers of high power amplifiers, complex high power switch networks and complex filter networks that are often waveguide-based and large in mass and size. All of these factors contribute to high power, volume and mass demands, where power, volume and mass are limited on a spacecraft. Conventional FDMA architecture also produces high heat demands due to, for example, complex thermal dissipation systems for high power components.
Other examples of conventional communication platform architectures that may include multiport amplifier systems include regenerative repeaters operating in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) with an ATM Switch for switching, routing, and multiplexing. However, these communication architectures typically require RF signals to be demodulated and remodulated, creating a bandwidth throughput bottleneck. Because of the bottlenecks, these communication architectures are suitable for low data rate performance and are not well suited for broadband architectures. These ATM systems also include fixed routing through the ATM switch and the burden of routing the RF signals from the reception antenna beam to the broadcast antenna beam is placed on the communication architecture itself, which is highly inefficient and increases complexity and power usage of the satellite. These ATM systems also often use fixed dwell times (e.g. fixed time division multiple access (TDMA) time frames for each antenna beam) limiting the overall bandwidth available to the system.
In beam hopping platform switch time division multiple access (PS-TDMA) systems, RF signals are routed to individual beams sequentially in time rather than simultaneously at different frequencies as in FDMA systems. The total traffic capacity of the antenna beam is dependent on the dwell time in addition to or instead of the fraction of frequency bandwidth allocated in the beam. Beam hopping PS-TDMA architectures also replace complex microwave input multiplexer and output multiplexer filter networks typically used in FDMA systems. However, Beam Hopping PS-TDMA architectures still face challenges in providing a cost-effective way for routing high RF power to antenna beams only for the time period of TDMA dwell time. Conventional beam hopping PS-TDMA architectures are implemented with high power amplifiers dedicated to single antenna beams, which present a significant burden on communication platform power supplies. The high power amplifiers used in conventional beam hopping PS-TDMA architectures further exacerbate power use concerns as the power supplies for high power amplifiers cannot switch on and off at the switching rates of typical TDMA frames and, consequently, must remain on even when no RF signal is present. In conventional beam hopping PS-TDMA architectures where high power amplifiers can be switched between antenna beams, the high power switch networks that are coupled to the high power amplifiers increase mass, occupy volume and must address high RF power considerations such as thermal dissipation, hot switching, ohmic loss and multipaction.